The journey of Indonesian female students in Australia: an autoethnography

Abstract

This autoethnographic thesis is about my personal and academic journey as a transnational Indonesian female student in Australia, shared in conversation with the stories of other Indonesian female students who I have come across and walked this journey with. My autoethnography was influenced by the pathways walked by other female scholars before me, such as Helene Cixous, Laurel Richardson, Carolyn Ellis and Elizabeth Mackinlay, and with their writing as my travel companions, I explore the way I took a major turn in my research journey towards writing differently in the academic space. As an Indonesian woman, an important part of this autoethnography is the journey I embarked on to dare and challenge myself to play around and experiment with writing in a language which is not my native one.This study is grounded in the terrain of international education, the complexities of globalization and mobility. I explore the entanglements that shape our individual and collective unnoticed experiences, and the ways in which we form subjectivity, identity, and belonging in and through ambiguous spaces of international education. Central to understanding our individual and collective pathways heading to overseas studies, which for many of us are vague, unclear and seemingly out of reach, are the flows of privilege, power and access through our gendered and cultural subjectivities through and across various locations, borders and sites of experiences. I explore the ways that the concept of imagination becomes a site of action and agency, the framing of scholarships as a gift, the feeling of privilege and the lack of privilege, the ways that our gender and cultural difference plays out as a feeling of exclusion, and the ways we perform the multiplicity of our personal lives as students, daughters, mothers, and wives, socially and geographically distanced from families and loved ones. Significantly, the stories shared in this thesis seek to resist the framing of Indonesian female students in higher education as occupying a space of lack, deficiency and victimization. Taking an autoethnographic approach is one way to challenge such established notions.The aim of this thesis is twofold: to share the ways that Indonesian female students experience the journey of higher education differently and to write of these shared experiences differently.